Advanced Performance Analysis of HPC Workloads on Cavium ThunderX

Abstract

The interest towards Arm based platforms as HPC solutions increased significantly during the last 5 years. In this paper we show that, in contrast to the early days of pioneer tests, several application performance analysis techniques can now be applied also to Arm based SoCs. To show the possibilities offered by the available tools, we provide as an example, the analysis of a Lattice Boltzmann HPC production code, highly optimized for several architectures and now ported also to Armv8. We tested it on a system based on a production silicon, Cavium CN8890 SoC. In particular, as performance analysis tools we adopt Extrae and Paraver, making use of the PAPI support, initially developed by us for the ThunderX platform, and now available also upstream. The contribution of this paper is twofold: first, we demonstrate that performance analysis tools available on standard HPC platforms, independently from the CPU providers, are nowadays available also for Arm SoCs; second, we actually optimize an HPC application for this platforms, showing similarities with other architectures.